I love Live CD’s. They are a CD that you toss in your computer and run an entire operating system right off of it…no hard drive required.
The even better part is that a lot of new distributions of linux are building the installer right into their Live CD, so that means you boot your computer up into an operating system, and then use that same CD to install that operating system onto your hard drive. That means if your hard drive crashes you can get to rocking again and recover stuff and run diagnostics all right from a CD
In fact, that is what I’m doing now. In one window, files are copying to the system, and in another I’m blogging.
Pretty sweet, it means I can actually use my computer for useful things (or not drastically useful, but to do something at least) while it is installing the operating system.
Microsoft needs to get on this band-wagon. Their “Preinstallation Envoirnments” or Windows PE for short, is a pile of crap for anyone who isn’t installing like 50 copies of windows at a shot. And, that is the closest thing they got. Bart’s PE builder, made by a guy named Bart, is actually something much closer, but I found it to be fairly slow in comparison.
Anyway, if you want to just try it out sometime….kind of as an emergency solution for if you computer crashes, or as a try-it before you mess with your windows installation, go over to ubuntu’s website and download their “Desktop CD” which is their live CD.
http://www.ubuntu.com
That is all for this morning.